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175 with 113 posters participating, including story authorUPDATE: Scholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the translation 'makes no sense' and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers. Read our article about the debunking here.
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system.The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Samogitian book dealer who purchased it in 1912. Nov 08, 2011 The Voynich Manuscript is written in an unknown alphabet.Not a living soul knows what it means. During centuries top military code-breakers, linguists, historians, and laymen have tried to decipher it, all failed.
Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. 'From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry,' he wrote. 'The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.' So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.
Further study of the herbs and images in the book reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript's text and images had been plagiarized directly from them (they, in turn, were copied in part from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny, and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books were extremely rare, so nobody complained.
Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image—copied, of course, from another manuscript—of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)
The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume.
Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs' discovery makes it sound plausible.
See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here.
Posted by9 months ago
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I've written this before, but it bears repetition.
Here are some basic guidelines I impose on any 'proofs' that pop up in my news feed:
![Manuscript Manuscript](/uploads/1/2/5/0/125046466/366805501.jpg)
- The proposed solution must be replicable by another researcher who only knows the system.
- The attempt at replication must arrive at the same output as the proposer, from the same input (e.g. digital transcripts or high-resolution scans).
- That output must have meaning in some context.
- Both laws 1 and 2 *must* be satisfied.
Furthermore, look out for these well-worn excuses for 'credibility gaps', which again, we've all seen before: “I don't know enough about the language or enciphering method.”“I need more instruction or more explanation.”“I didn't read the output correctly in order to properly understand it.”
Other warning signs: The glyphs can have multiple meanings. These meanings can be pronounced or otherwise interpreted in multiple ways. The output is in multple languages. (Okay, maybe a trade language has a few different influences, but half a dozen different languages? Seriously.) Some glyphs can be ignored, i.e. nulls, filler, etc. often arbitrarily. After the subjective use of glyphs to derive words in different languages, the output is further subjected to additional 'interpretation' to try to make sense of it.
N.B. If the proposer used Google Translate, that's a sure giveaway. I can put all kinds of codswallop in there and manage to get something vaguely intelligible out (GI/GO). See the Google Translate dog^N apocalypse threads for reference.
![Voynich manuscript pdf download Voynich manuscript pdf download](http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/images/465809e0fd7923f52b1764dc16b53fcaa296fdd48f82a92d537677d135b98608.jpeg)
A personal observation I'd like to make is that I highly doubt that the manuscript's author(s) could have written a such codex using a convoluted obfuscation and/or encoding method while keeping the ductus so steady with almost no corrections. They don't appear to have been doing long division in Roman numerals (so to speak) in their head(s) while they wrote.
Just my 2 ducats worth...
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